January 23, 2014

Promoted tweets are the window to the soul of your brand. And how people respond reveals more than what you post.

@McDonalds ran this one this morning. From an analytics perspective, the retweets and favorites probably outweigh the negative comments.
But nothing here gives me a good feeling about grabbing breakfast at McDonald’s. The bad instagram-esque photo isn't doing them any favors and the copy is even flatter.

If you're going to use social as a broadcast medium, why not make the extra effort to create a message that actually inspires or entertains?

October 1, 2013

Don't worry social media ninjas and gurus, it's still a game-changer for joining the conversation. If you do it with a touch of craft, meaningful engagement and valuable content are still social's greatest strengths.

But IPO & buyout fever has induced a more traditional approach of buying eyeballs instead of earning them.

Of course, it's all a waste if you don't follow this rule: Make something worth sharing and people will.

Pretty well executed example from Honda using a promoted celebrity tweet to drive views of a TV commercial:

September 24, 2013

Execution matters. Fuji posted this spot on youtube on February 19, 2013.
And Mercedes-Benz posted the following on September 23, 2013. I believe in coincidence. And I've have seen different teams come up with the exact same idea and different agencies pitch similar campaigns more than once. So I don't care if someone saw the other spot before executing theirs. What's interesting to me is if they did something to make it their own and make it better.

UPDATE:
The team behind the Mercedes spot, Art Director Lucas Osis and Copywriter Nico Baumann, were interviewed by Teressa Iezzi in this Co.Create article about how they made the spot.

Of course, this quote jumped out at me.

"We then remembered a video we’ve seen a while ago: a guy moving a chicken around while its head stood perfectly still: Exactly the same thing the Mercedes system is able to do. (A perfect analogy! But above all we wanted to create something that we would really enjoy to watch. So we tried to improve it somehow and thought: What’s better than seeing a chicken shaking? A chicken that is shaking to some funky disco music of course! And hopefully, people will agree with us."

I don't care if they saw the Fuji spot or one of other random chicken head videos on the internet. The key is this phrase, "So we tried to improve it somehow..."